> Did he really discover it if a) we were already here? And B) the first Europeans to arrive were Vikings.

"Discover" can also mean discovering it for the Eurasian and African worlds, and I'd say he did discover it because the Vikings never shared their information with anyone and their voyages had no lasting impact outside of the very small area they were present in.

Norse Vinland is an interesting bit of history, but ultimately it did not matter much to the world since the colony quickly died out and the Norsemen did not establish any sustainable and long-lasting trade route or maintained contact with that land. Columbus is the famous one because he went back, told everyone what he found, and his voyage is what began the actual centuries only process of settlement, conquest, etc. which changed both continents forever.

Or literally just switch Columbus for Amerigo Vespucci or Giovanni Caboto, who were also Italian explorers who mapped out America (and in the case of Amerigo, gave it the name America)

Or Russia. IIRC the general gist was that Danes and Norwegians went to Britain, while 'Swedes' (Svea, Goths, etc.) went eastwards to Russia and into the Black Sea.

There had also already been an Arab revolt against British rule in the Levant and Zionist settlement in the 1930s, so there wasn't much apetite to add more "fuel to the fire" by having even more Jewish settlers come to the region

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine

> Did you never consider the idea that the German government might ask one or two of its citizens to... Oh, I don't know, lie for espionage purposes?

Tbh the Nazis were so abysmally incompetent at espionage that they genuinely might not have thought of that trick harhar.

>There's a quote from John Robert Seely - "We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind". I always took that as "we really didn't know what we were doing."

That is a good way of looking at it. It's pretty much Capital Market expansion seeping into whatever cracks it found across the world. British merchants would find a neat port, and the navy and army would soon follow behind them (either to deny that area to European competitors, or to enforce the economic interests of the merchants through violence).

There was never any grand central plan or vision to it. No council of rulers sitting together in a room saying "we are going to forge a big empire!" Just the ruthless pursuit of financial interests leading them there over the years.

> the British were unable to change them or simply uninterested?

Can be both. At the height of the empire, Britain's population was only 47 million, while India stood at 400 million. It's hard to really change people when they outnumber you 10 times over.

Besides the logistical barrier, the British Empire didn't need to change India, ruling India without changing up its cultures too radically was working out just fine. Why tear down already functioning structures of power when you don't need to? Many parts of India were ruled through local Indian rulers, who aligned themselves with the British Empire (be it for personal enrichment or simply accepting that they had no other alternative). Playing off pre-exisiting animosity also worked out great, it was much easier to rule over diverse people's who had a past history of fighting each other, than it is to rule over a newly unified homogenised culture.

> Yet somehow people from this subcontinent still get along with the British, possibly better than the other way around.

What do you mean by "get along" in this context? Because obviously on an individual person to person basis, getting along is very easy and (sane) individuals won't let nationality get in the same way of cordial socialization.

There's also the fact that the British Empire is slowly fading into the past with every year that goes by, and the problems of the future are coming up. People won't dedicate too much energy towards hating a past foe when they literally have nuclear warheads pointed at the present one. It didn't take long for Poland's hate for Germany to be replaced with a hostility to Russia, because the Russians were/are much more recent.

There's also the Dutch VOC who operated in Indonesia, and whose market value actually exceeded the British EIC.

Certainly didn't help (the British) that diseases like Malaria, Yellow fever, etc. thrived in tropical climates such as in Southern India. European men used to drop dead like flies from these diseases.

NZ used to be a 80-90%+ white country (with the other 10%-20% being Polynesian) until very recently. The overwhelming majority of the Asian population immigrated in recent decades, and it takes a some time for families to establish themselves in a new country in order to have the luxury of pursuing politics as a career. When Italians and Irishmen started immigrating to the USA, it took decades for them to build up the social networks and capital in order to climb to the ranks of Governors, Mayors, etc. too.

I wonder how old something has to be in order to be classified as a cultural relic owned by the state. How do you draw the line between "family heirloom great-grandpa gave me" and "artefact"?

I wish these articles would be more clear in specifying that Samhain is a Scottish Gaelic name. For all we know, the Celtic Picts (who inhabited Scotland/Caledonia and were more closely related to the Welsh and Cumbrians) would not have called it that or necessarily celebrated in the same manner.

Gauls is a better term, "French Celts" is a bit weird since the name France derives from the Germanic Franks and French culture itself is a Romanized one at its core.

That being said, I find it unlikely to have been from Gaul. "Halloween" is a very North American and UK-Ireland type of thing, not something you find in the rest of Europe. The rest of the continent celebrates All Saints' Eve without costumes or apple bobbing and whatnot, instead they go to mass and pay their respects to dead family members.

In France, Spain, Portugal (all areas formerly inhabited by Celts the Romans conquered), Halloween traditions like trick or treating and costumes are seen as Americanisation and foreign.

Would those Celtic territories celebrate Samhain in the same manner we think of? I think it's often understated that there was plenty of inner-Celtic diversity, for instance Irish and Scottish Gaelic are quite distinct from Welsh and Breton languages. The Romans largely only ruled over the Gauls, Britons, Iberians, etc. but never bothered with the Goidelic groups.

> I didn’t know this but apparently when the British arrived, India was the wealthiest nation in the world by a hige margin

Note that this depends on what you mean by "wealthiest". India was wealthy the same way China and the USA are wealthy today, but not wealthy in the sense that Switzerland is a country of rich people.

Before the Industrial revolution, virtually almost all of the population (across the world) would have been peasants living in pretty primitive conditions, be it in Qing China or in Habsburg Spain. Urban populations were only a tenth of the population at best, and the wealthy merchants within them would of course be an even smaller minority.